Marie Cardinal

"When a woman writes the word 'table', you think of a table that is served, cleaned, in use, polished or dusty ... when a man writes 'table', you see a table made of wood, the work of an artisan, the fruit of work, somewhere where you can sit down in order to eat or speak."

These words come from the French writer Marie Cardinal, who has died aged 72, in Autrement Dit (in its English edition, In Other Words, 1977), a book of reminiscence and dialogue with another French writer, Annie Leclerc. It clearly expressed the view of someone we would call a feminist, and it is a direct and simple reflection. It has no mention of Lacan's vision of Freud, no hint of deconstruction, no coded militancy. Hence, Marie Cardinal never became a figure of intellectual feminism.

Her many novels, the first of which appeared in 1962, have no similarity to those produced by writers who were avoiding the traditional so that they could be hailed as part of the new movement in literature, le nouveau roman. Hence, Cardinal was never acknowledged by the intelligentsia of Paris. But her novels, widely read and much appreciated, are imaginative and meaningful.

Cardinal was born into a well-to-do French family in Algiers. Her parents divorced shortly after her birth, and she was brought up by her mother, who came from a family that had been settled in Algeria since 1836. She was educated in religious institutions until she went to the Sorbonne, where she graduated in philosophy.

In 1953, she married Jean-Pierre Ronfard, and, for several years, they lived outside France; she taught in the French lycées of Salonika, Vienna, Lisbon and Montreal. A son and a daughter were born in Algiers, and a second daughter in Lisbon. In July 1969, Marie and her children moved to Paris, while her husband stayed in Canada.

She stopped teaching and began a long course of psychoanalysis, earning money, in the meantime, by journalism, ghost-writing, and research. She helped in the making of Jean-Luc Godard's film Deux Ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais D'elle (1967), and acted in Bresson's film Mouchette (also 1967).

During the 1960s, Cardinal published three novels and wrote Cet Eté Là, a somewhat flippant account of her film-making experience, which contained unflattering portraits of a fussy director and unattractively false actors. But it was La Clé Sur La Porte (1973) and Les Mots Pour Le Dire (1975) - the English translation, The Words To Say It, was published in 1984 - that made her reputation, and put her into the bestseller lists. She once claimed that all novels were autobiographical, and certainly both these works had their origins in her own experiences. There was the intense relationship she had had, both in childhood and adolescence, with her mother; there was the knowledge that her mother had never wanted her to be born, and had considered having an abortion.

In La Clé Sur La Porte, a woman describes how she has opened her home to young people, friends of her teenage children. No one is excluded, and the key is always in the door. The narrator tells of her own youthful experiences, and comments on the behaviour of the young - relations between boys and girls, and drug-taking, are discussed.

Les Mots Pour Le Dire tells of Marie's own course of psy choanalysis, a seven-year experience which saves her from the asylum and allows her to be reborn. The reader can feel, or imagine, the same situation.

All this is specifically female. Pressures from religion, and pressures from society, are all directed at women. There is the physical nature of the female, characterised by bleeding. Women spend their days as mothers, workers, domestic labourers and wives who must, at the end of the day, be attractive to men.

Yet there is no hostility to marriage; Cardinal herself remained married, although she and her husband frequently lived in different countries. She could be amusing, and, when she asked whether Jean-Paul Sartre was expected to wear false eyelashes when he appeared on television, she made a feminist point very effectively.

She was, for a time, president of the Union of Writers in the French Language, and even in old age, continued to write. In 1987, she returned to the bestseller lists with Les Grands Désordres, about drug-taking. Like many of her books, her last work, Amours . . . Amours (1998), was set in Algeria. It is nostalgic, filled with the guilt and the pride of an ex-colonialist.